Reading through their experiences and thoughts on life learning is a breath of fresh air. This isn’t a book about how to teach your kids. It isn’t about which workbooks to buy and which curriculum to follow. It doesn’t give you a schedule, or worksheets or tell you that kids need a gold star at the end of each day.

Imagine you are a new homeschooling parent (or even an old one like me), and David and Joyce sit near you at a restaurant. They start to have this amazing conversation about homeschooling and what they did and what they think and you get to hear all of it (much to the annoyance of your partner sitting across from you).

Joyce says in the chapter, Perfection is the Enemy of Excellence, that “…schools – and often parents, and ultimately the kids themselves – are bound up in this concept of perfection. Kids begin being tested (and trained for testing) from kindergarten on, so it is not surprising that many young people will go without sleep or play to achieve straight A’s and strive for perfect SAT scores – even though they are told that the best colleges and universities do not admit students simply because the have a perfect record, that these institutions want an interesting person, too. The perfection-obsessed kids rush around the world doing “community service” by trying to demonstrate their interest in cheetahs in Africa, orphans in Thailand, schools in Peru (often ignoring, or asking for a contribution to their travels from, their elderly grandfather who would simply love to have them read the Sunday paper to him or put the worm on the hook as they do a little fishing together).”

David responds that while both he and Joyce have benefited from going to college, neither had the benefit of being homeschooled. “Attend to your six-, eight-, or ten-year-olds’ learning needs and desires today, learn to listen really, really well and act upon what you are hearing, and I can virtually guarantee that the future – college or no – will take care of itself. And relax: Perfection has absolutely nothing to do with it, and there is no such thing as excellence that transcends the dogged pursuit of it.

“Remember that whatever is going on in school, at home you have the choice to make sure that love and listening are in no short supply. And ultimately, that is all that really matters.”

With flashes back into their own childhoods and homeschooling days with their own children, what we, the reader, learns from this book is not how to homeschool, but that life is learning and learning is life. Once we decide that learning only happens in a formal setting – be it at school or home – we limit ourselves and our children.

There are many, many pearls to glean from this book (did I just mix my metaphors?), but what I got was a reinforcement of something I think I knew already, but doubt occasionally. What is that? The simple truth that being present and living in the now is the most important thing. Seeing and hearing and paying attention to your children and to the world are what’s important. Always striving and waiting for the next thing is what dooms us to unhappiness. “I’ll be happy when I graduate and get a “real” job and have a better car and a bigger place to live.” These are not the messages we need to be sending (or receiving). Things are good now. Enjoy the journey. Because that’s what really matters.

A copy of this book can be purchased at the Natural Life Books website.

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I buy a lot – and I mean a lot – of fresh fruit, cheese, all-natural granola bars, applesauce, frozen fruit for smoothies, milk, juice, some types of crackers, carrots, and cereal.

And then I do this crazy thing – I let the kids eat it. Pretty much whenever they want and in whatever order. I’ve had kids who have requested peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, cereal for dinner and all kinds of stuff in between.

Why do I do it? Because I still can’t take more than two cookies out of the cookie jar without feeling like I’m doing something bad. Because I still need to “clean my plate” even at the detriment of my own weight (and I’ve had some issues there) every night at dinner.

I never want my kids to feel like they need to have a “relationship” with food. I want them to be as active as they are, eat good things and then move along with their lives and not obsess about it the way I have throughout my life.

I used to feel like I had to have dessert after dinner, because if I didn’t – I wouldn’t get the opportunity again until the following day. I’ve witnessed my children eat a brownie at 10 am (something I would never have been allowed to do) and then forget about junk food all day long.

When they ask me why I won’t buy those little gummy fruit snacks, I tell them why. “Because they aren’t fruit.” I explain that there are some things I am willing to spend our money on and some things I’m not. I spend our money on real fruit and that’s that. I try not to make a big deal out of it, just explain and move along. It’s our food money and I wish to spend it on real food.

Now, there are some unschoolers who say, buy chips and soda and candy and let them have as much as they want. That’s a very valid point that I am in favor of in some ways – except – that I don’t want to buy it. I refuse to spend our food money on that stuff except for our Rock and Roll Fridays. I just don’t want to encourage the kids to eat it and I don’t want to eat it myself. But, I’ve explained that to the kids and they are good with that. We also don’t go to McDonald’s all of the time. The kids and I might want to stop and get a burger while we’re out, but I do have to, as the “grown-up” in the house, accept the fact that A.) I can’t afford it and B.) It’s gross and I don’t want to.

I appreciate the unschooler philosophy in some of these things, but I also appreciate my budget! So, I don’t control how much they eat of what I bring into the house. Do they have input? Absolutely! They always get to ask for things and we look at them and decide if it’s something we can bring into the house. Watching movies together like Food, Inc. has also helped cultivate our decision-making on food as a family.

I’ve been reading lately about families with lots of kids who put locks on their refrigerator and pantry. For real, I mean John and I might joke about it, but we don’t actually do it! What better way to tell a child that their feelings of thirst or hunger don’t matter? What better way to tell a child that the only time they can eat or drink is when “I” – the universal parent – say so? It’s like putting a newborn on a schedule to eat (oh, wait, I guess some people do that too).

As a society, we are learning more and more to eat when we’re hungry. And then to stop. This is very effective in defeating obesity. By continuing to encourage food schedules in children, we are dooming them to a lifetime of unhealthy eating habits.

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The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher
by John Taylor Gatto
New Society Publishers, 1992

“Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing
better to do at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The
license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and
English literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. I don’t teach
English, I teach school — and I win awards doing it.

“Teaching means different things in different places, but seven
lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They
constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways than you
can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty,
of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when
I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I
teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you
will:

I.

“A lady named Kathy wrote this to me from Dubois, Indiana the other
day:

“”What big ideas are important to little kids? Well, the biggest
idea I think they need is that what they are learning isn’t
idiosyncratic — that this is some system to it all and it’s not just
raining down on them as they helplessly absorb. That’s the task, to
understand, to make coherent.”

“Kathy has it wrong. The first lesson I teach is confusion.
Everything I teach is out of context… I teach the unrelating of
everything. I teach disconnections. I teach too much: the orbiting of
planets, the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural
drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral singing, assemblies, surprise guests,
fire drills, computer languages, parent’s nights, staff-development
days, pull-out programs, guidance with strangers you may never see
again, standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the
outside world… what do any of these things have to do with each
other?

“Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its
sequences turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal contradictions.
Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger
they feel at constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed
off on them as quality in education. The logic of the school-mind is
that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon
derived from economics, sociology, natural science and so on than to
leave with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails
learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too
many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest
relationship with each other, pretending for the most part, to an
expertise they do not possess.

“Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek,
and education is a set of codes for processing raw facts into meaning.
Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences, and the school obsession
with facts and theories the age-old human search lies well concealed.
This is harder to see in elementary school where the hierarchy of school
experience seems to make better sense because the good-natured simple
relationship of “let’s do this” and “let’s do that now” is just assumed
to mean something and the clientele has not yet consciously discerned
how little substance is behind the play and pretense.

“Think of all the great natural sequences like learning to walk and
learning to talk, following the progression of light from sunrise to
sunset, witnessing the ancient procedures of a farm, a smithy, or a
shoemaker, watching your mother prepare a Thanksgiving feast — all of
the parts are in perfect harmony with each other, each action justifies
itself and illuminates the past and future. School sequences aren’t
like that, not inside a single class and not among the total menu of
daily classes. School sequences are crazy. There is no particular
reason for any of them, nothing that bears close scrutiny. Few teachers
would dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a school or a teacher
could be criticized since everything must be accepted. School subjects
are learned, if they can be learned, like children learn the catechism
or memorize the 39 articles of Anglicanism. I teach the un-relating of
everything, an infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; what I
do is more related to television programming than to making a scheme of
order. In a world where home is only a ghost because both parents work
or because too many moves or too many job changes or too much ambition
or something else has left everybody too confused to stay in a family
relation I teach you how to accept confusion as your destiny. That’s
the first lesson I teach.

The second lesson I teach is your class position. I teach that
you must stay in class where you belong. I don’t know who decides that
my kids belong there but that’s not my business. The children are
numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right
class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has
increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being plainly
under the burden of numbers he carries. Numbering children is a big and
very profitable business, though what the strategy is designed to
accomplish is elusive. I don’t even know why parents would allow it to
be done to their kid without a fight.

In any case, again, that’s not my business. My job is to make
them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers
like their own. Or at the least endure it like good sports. If I do my
job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else because
I’ve shown how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have
contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the
class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That’s the real
lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your
place.

In spite of the overall class blueprint which assume that 99
percent of the kids are in their class to stay, I nevertheless make a
public effort to exhort children to higher levels of test success,
hinting at eventual transfer from the lower class as a reward. I
frequently insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire
them on the basis of test scores and grades, even though my own
experience is that employers are rightly indifferent to such things. I
never lie outright, but I’ve come to see that truth and schoolteaching
are, at bottom, incompatible just as Socrates said they were thousands
of years ago. The lesson of numbered classes is that everyone has a
proper place in they pyramid and that there is no way out of your class
except by number magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are
put.

The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children
not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it
appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by
demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up
and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with
each other for my favor. It’s heartwarming when they do that, it
impresses everyone, even me. When I’m at my best I plan lessons very
carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the
bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we’ve been
working on and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn
on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in
my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a
complete experience except on the installment plan.

Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth
finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will
condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer
important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their
argument is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, converting
every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living
mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate
each undertaking with indifference.

The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and
red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and disgraces I teach you
to surrender your will to the predestined chain of command. Rights may
be granted or withheld by any authority, without appeal because rights
do not exist inside a school, not even the right of free speech, the
Supreme Court has so ruled, unless school authorities say they do. As a
schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for
those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for
behavior that threatens my control. Individuality is constantly trying
to assert itself among children and teenagers so my judgments come thick
and fast. Individuality is a contradiction of class theory, a curse to
all systems of classification. Here are some common ways it shows up:
children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of
moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the
hallway on the grounds that they need water. I know they don’t but I
allow them to deceive me because this conditions they to depend on my
favors. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children
angry, depressed or happy by things outside my ken; rights in such
things cannot be recognized by schoolteachers, only privileges which can
be withdrawn, hostages to good behavior.

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people
wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important
lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than
ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the
important choices; only I can determine what you must study, or rather,
only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I enforce. If
I’m told that evolution is fact instead of a theory I transmit that as
ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been to think.

This power to control what children will think lets me separate
successful students from failures very easily. Successful children do
the thinking I appoint them with a minimum of resistance and decent show
of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide
what few we have time for, or it is decided by my faceless employer.
The choices are his, why should I argue? Curiosity has no important
place in my work, only conformity.

Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the concepts
to know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions for
themselves about what they will learn and when they will learn it. How
can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are
procedures to break the will of those who resist; it is more difficult,
naturally, if the kid has respectable parents who come to his aid, but
that happens less and less in spite of the bad reputation of schools.
Nobody in the middle class I ever met actually believes that their kid’s
school is one of the bad ones. Not a single parent in 26 years of
teaching. That’s amazing and probably the best testimony to what
happens to families when mother and father have been well-schooled
themselves, learning the seven lessons.

Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is
hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this
lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren’t
trained to be dependent:

The social-service businesses could hardly survive, they would
vanish I think, into the recent historical limbo out of which they
arose. Counselors and therapists would look on in horror as the supply
of psychic invalids vanished. Commercial entertainment of all sorts,
including television, would wither as people learned again how to make
their own fun. Restaurants, prepared-food and a whole host of other
assorted food services would be drastically down-sized if people
returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to
plant, pick, chop and cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and
engineering would go, too, the clothing business and schoolteaching as
well, unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our
schools each year.

The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem. If you’ve
ever tried to wrestle a kid into line whose parents have convinced him
to believe they’ll love him in spite of anything, you know how
impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform. Our world
wouldn’t survive a flood of confident people very long so I teach that
your self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are
constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its
precision, is sent into students’ homes to signal approval or to mark
exactly down to a single percentage point how dissatisfied with their
children parents should be. The ecology of good schooling depends upon
perpetuating dissatisfaction just as much as commercial economy depends
on the same fertilizer. Although some people might be surprised how
little time or reflection goes into making up these mathematical
records, the cumulative weight of the objective-seeming documents
establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at
certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual
judgment of strangers.

Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system
that ever appeared on the planet, is never a factor in these things.
The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should
not trust themselves or their parents, but need to rely on the
evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are
worth.

The seventh lesson I teach is that you can’t hide. I teach
children they are always watched by keeping each student under constant
surveillance as do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for
children, there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to
keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged
to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I
encourage parents to file their own child’s waywardness, too. A family
trained to snitch on each other isn’t likely to be able to conceal any
dangerous secrets. I assign a type of extended schooling called
“homework”, too, so that the surveillance travels into private
households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn
something unauthorized from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to
some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of
schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands. The
meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one
can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an
ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers, a central
prescription set down Republic, in City of God, in Institutes of the
Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan and many other places.
All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing:
children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under
tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you
can’t get them into a uniformed marching band.

II.

It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-
schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among the
best of my student’s parents, only a small number can imagine a
different way to do things. “The kids have to know how to read and
write, don’t they?” “They have to know how to add and subtract, don’t
they?” “They have to learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep
a job.”

Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the United
States; originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from
regimentation made us the miracle of the world, social class boundaries
were relatively easy to cross, our citizenry was marvelously confident,
inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for
themselves. We were something, we Americans, all by ourselves, without
government sticking its nose into our lives, without institutions and
social agencies telling us how to think and feel; no, all by ourselves
we were something, as individuals.

We’ve had a society increasingly under central control in the
United States since just before the Civil War and such a society
requires compulsory schooling, government monopoly schooling to maintain
itself. Before the society changed, schooling wasn’t very important
anywhere. We had it, but not too much of it and only as much as an
individual wanted. People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic
just fine anyway, there are some studies which show literacy at the time
of the American Revolution, at least on the Eastern seaboard, as close
to total. Tom Paine’s Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population
of 2,500,000, 20 percent of which was slave and another 50 percent
indentured.

Were the colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading,
writing and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit as long as
the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until
someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on him. Millions of
people teach themselves these things; it really isn’t very hard. Pick
up a fifth grad textbook in math or rhetoric from 1850 and you’ll see
that the texts were pitched then on what would today be college level.
The continuing cry for “basic skills” practice is a smoke screen behind
which schools preempt the time of children for 12 years and teach them
the seven lessons I’ve just taught you.

We’ve had a society increasingly under central control in the
United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the
clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive
by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So,
too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence,
cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of
the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family
importance that central control imposes. The character of large
compulsory institutions is inevitable, they want more and until there
isn’t any more to give. School takes our children away from any
possibility of an active role in community life — in fact it destroys
communities by reserving the training of children to the hands of
certified experts — and by doing so it ensures that they cannot grow up
fully human. Aristotle taught that without a fully active role in
community life you could not hope to become a healthy human being.
Surely he was right. Look around you the next time you are near a
school or an old people’s reservation, that will be the demonstration.

School as it was built is an essential support system for a vision
of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones
in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control.
School is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem
inevitable, although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the
American Revolution. In colonial days right through the period of the
early Republic we had no schools to speak of — read Franklin’s
Autobiography for a man who had no time to waste in school — and yet
the promise of Democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our
backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt –
compulsory subordination for all. That was the secret Plato reluctantly
transmitted in The Republics when Glaucon and Adeimantus exhorted from
Socrates the plan for total state control of human life that would be
necessary to maintain a society where some people took more than their
share. “I will show you,” said Socrates, “how to bring about such a
feverish city, but you will not like what I am going to say.” And so
the blueprint of the seven lesson school was first sketched.

The current debate about whether we should have a national
curriculum is phony — we already have one, locked up in the seven
lessons I just taught you and a few more I decided to spare you. Such a
curriculum produces physical, moral, and intellectual paralysis and no
curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its hideous effects.
What is currently under discussion in our national school hysteria about
failing academic performance is a great irrelevancy that misses the
point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they
do it well — How to be a good Egyptian and where your place is in the
pyramid.

III.

None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impossible to
overthrow. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people and
there is no one right way; if we broke the power of Egyptian illusion we
would see that. There is no life and death international competition
threatening our national existence, difficult as that is to even think
about, let alone believe, in the face of a constant media barrage of
myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is
self-sufficient, including energy. I realize that runs counter to the
most fashionable thinking of political economists, but the “profound
transformation” of our economy these people talk about is neither
inevitable nor irreversible. Global economics does not speak to the
public need for jobs, affordable homes, adequate schools and medical
care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and
cultural renewal, or simple justice. All global ambitions are based on
a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common
human reality that I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would
agree with me if they had a choice. We might be able to see that if we
regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is
genuinely to be found — in families, in friends, the passage of
seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity,
generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence
and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real
families, real friends and real communities are built. Then we would be
truly self-sufficient.

How did these awful places, these “schools”, come about? Well,
casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of forms, a mildly
useful adjunct to growing up. But total-schooling as we know it is a
byproduct of the two “Red Scares” of 1848 and 1919, when powerful
interests feared a revolution among our own industrial poor. Partly,
too, total schooling came about because old-line American families were
revolted by the home cultures of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigrants –
and revolted by the Catholic religion they brought with them. Certainly
a third contributing cause to making a jail for children called school
must be located in the prospect with which these same families regarded
the free movement of Africans through the society after the Civil War.

Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion,
class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual
dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance — all of these things
are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of
finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it
became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic — to
regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy
and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from
schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution’s
original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the
middle classes.

Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he
took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable
direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the
teaching function that belongs to everybody in a healthy community.
Professional teaching tends to another serious error: It makes things
that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and
arithmetic, seem difficult by insisting they be taught through
pedagogical procedures. With lessons like the ones I teach day after
day, it should be little wonder we have a national crisis the nature of
the one we have today, young people indifferent to the adult world and
to the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of
toys and violence. Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the 21st
century cannot concentrate on anything for very long, they have a poor
sense of time past and to come,they are mistrustful of intimacy like the
children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from
significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel,
materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the
unexpected, addicted to distraction.

All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and
magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which prevents effective
personality development by its hidden curriculum. Indeed, without
exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children
our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified
schoolteacher. No common school that actually dared to teach the use of
dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ
would last very long without being torn to pieces. School has become a
replacement for church in our secular society, and like church its
teachings must be taken on faith.

It is time that we faced the fact squarely that institutional
schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the 7-Lesson
Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply
and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of
the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking schools
require would cost so much less than we are spending now that powerful
interests cannot afford to let it happen. You must understand that
first and foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and an agency
for letting contracts. We cannot afford to save money by reducing the
scope of our operation or by diversifying the product we offer, even to
help children grow up right. That is the Iron Law of institutional
schooling — it is a business neither subject to normal accounting
procedures nor to the rational scalpel of competition.

Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the
likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family schools
and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and crafts
schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government
education. I’m trying to describe a free market in schooling just
exactly like the one the country had right up until the Civil War, one
in which students volunteer for the kind of education that suits them,
even if that means self-education. It didn’t hurt Benjamin Franklin
that I can see.

These options now exist in miniature, wonderful survivals of a
strong and vigorous past, but they are unavailable only to the
resourceful, the courageous, the lucky, or the rich. The near
impossibility of one of these better roads opening for the shattered
families of the poor or the bewildered host camped on the fringes of the
urban middle class foretells the disaster of 7-Lesson Schools is going
to grow unless we do something bold and decisive with the mess of
government monopoly schooling.

After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don’t be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter’s schooltime. All the
pathologies we’ve considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life.

Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time
left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a
combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or
single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family
time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-
soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture
which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material
experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we
follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These
lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like
starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the
only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.

I should know.

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I just love this quote. I have an interesting opportunity to compare my oldest, who is now 16, and my fifth child, Jack, who is almost 4. I was so concerned as a first time parent that my child be able to do everything. I made sure that he knew his letters by the age of 3 – he was reading by four, knew his numbers, could write his name, etc., etc. I admit it, particularly in his younger years, I pushed and pushed. Mostly because he just seemed so smart that I felt if I didn’t I was neglecting my duty as his mother.

Jack is very much like Matt was – he is curious and smart and interested in everything (not that my other kids aren’t, mind you) and being a little older now and a little more confident in my abilities to raise children, I decided not to force things on Jack the way I did on Matt. I still buy “work” book and activity books and coloring books – but I don’t make Jack sit down with them. I also put the letters up on our wall and put words on different items in the house, but I don’t make Jack sit down and practice. Do you know what happened? Jack is just as interested in words and letters and numbers as Matt every was. AND he is discovering them more organically. He brings his workbooks to me and asks me to do them with him – rather than the other way around. When he’s obviously getting bored or tired of it, we stop and do something else.

I always believed that if I just provided the resources and was a source of help and guidance myself that my children would learn. But I didn’t start to see that in action until Matthew was much older, when he started studying subjects on his own and now is applying to colleges.

Seeing Jack explore the world and learn things just by being provided the opportunity to do them is quite an amazing experience. I’m not a very disciplined person. We have our routines certainly, but I don’t enjoy standing at the head of the dining room table and “teaching.” I know there are lots of homeschoolers who do it this way – and call me lazy – but I just don’t enjoy recreating a school-type atmosphere. Rather, my rule is that each child has to do their level-appropriate math and then we kind of just let the day find itself. It’s important to keep up with math because if you stop and start it you often miss steps that you’ll need later, and if my kids want to go to college or take their SATs, then they need to keep up with math!

I always ask each child to think of a topic at the beginning of each week that they would like to be an “expert” in – spiders, Mars, dinosaurs – it doesn’t matter. And then I help them find books, websites, magazine articles and sometimes field trips that will help become experts in their field. Sometimes I ask them to write me a report, or just log the information in their science logs or maybe just make a poster or some other things that is representative of what they have found out (not what they have learned!).

I am always reading and writing. It’s my job, certainly, but it’s my job because it’s what I like to do. Hopefully, seeing me read and write all of the time impacts my children. I think it does. Jack is always toting a book around – whether or not it’s a little too much for him to read just yet. And while Liam isn’t much of a fiction reader, he is always logging things in his notebooks and making signs for the house and researching things on the Internet and at the library. Alex, Matt and Lydia are all big readers, finishing all types of books all of the time. And Alex is a great artist – choosing to journal things by writing and drawing cartoons.

What’s my point? As Einstein said, our delicate little plants need stimulation – and food, water and light – but mostly freedom. Freedom to learn, and freedom to be. As parents, it’s hard for us to let go and see what will happen, but I know that any child who is loved, cared for and provided with the necessary tools to learn – and the guidance to use them – will learn, whether we subscribe to a curriculum or not!

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“In an effort to increase the public drumbeat for criminalizing
homeschooling, a memo has been distributed containing the top 10
reasons why public schooling is better than homeschooling. Here is an
excerpt from that memo:

1. Most parents were educated in the under funded public school system,
and so are not smart enough to homeschool their own children.

2. Children who receive one-on-one homeschooling will learn more than
others, giving them an unfair advantage in the marketplace. This is
undemocratic.

3. How can children learn to defend themselves unless they have to fight
off bullies on a daily basis?

4. Ridicule from other children is important to the socialization process.

5. Children in public schools can get more practice “Just Saying No” to
drugs, cigarettes and alcohol.

6. Fluorescent lighting may have significant health benefits.

7. Publicly asking permission to go to the bathroom teaches young people
their place in society.

8. The fashion industry depends upon the peer pressure that only public
schools can generate.

9. Public schools foster cultural literacy, passing on important
traditions like the singing of “Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin
laid an egg.”

10. Homeschooled children may not learn important office career skills,
like how to sit still for six hours straight.”

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‘Nuff said!

-Mish

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Let me say first, that I am a huge fan of the Duggar family. I think they are just amazing. I wish I had had their convictions about having a large family when I was young. I made a lot of mistakes and have allowed behaviors in my children (particularly my oldest) that I wish I had “nipped in the bud” years ago. I wish I had their conviction to homeschool right from the beginning, but as you have read in my other columns, I often fall prey to that “Back to School” mentality.

I believe that having a lot of kids and being environmentally conscious are not mutually exclusive. The Duggars, for example, are very responsible in a lot of ways. I noticed while watching their journey across America (I told you, I’m a huge fan…) that they were very conscientious about bringing along their food and cooking along the way. This, of course, is also very frugal. They recently built a huge house, and while I wish they would explore with solar panels or a windmill, they do heat very efficiently with wood.

Raising a lot of children together also means that the children learn how to be a part of a small community. How many only children – or children with one sibling – do I know who will leave lights on everywhere, take a 20 minute shower, or wash one pair of jeans in the machine? Believe it or not – a lot.

While I appreciate that as a whole my family might eat more than the average family, we try to do our part by growing a lot of what we eat. We cut our own wood to heat our house. And we too, would like to use solar panels or a windmill for our electricity. I don’t know how much trash the Duggars get rid of each week, but we are huge recyclers and only take a bag of trash to the dump every other week. The rest is recyclable. There’s a lot of it, but it’s all recycled.

My children also know what it means to share space and share water. They are helpful with each other and some of the most genuinely nice people I know. And they always have someone to play or hang out with! I know so many kids who are so lonely. Just waiting until someone comes home from work to hang out with – and then everyone is too tired to do anything! It makes me sad.

Having a lot of children does mean driving a bigger car. I know the Duggars have a fleet. We don’t. We have one car, a GMC Yukon. I would have gotten a van, but I need the 4-wheel-drive. If you ever come up to the farm, you’ll see why! We live up a massive hill!

The car thing bugs me. But, in an effort to reduce our dependence on it, both John and I work from home. And we don’t go out a lot. We try and do a field trip once every couple of weeks for the kids and we go to a lot of soccer games. We are looking into converting the truck to diesel…we’ll see.

The thing I love most about having a lot of kids is: the kids. I just love having my kids around. I hope they will all stay nearby and have kids too. I want them all to have as happy a life as I have. Really. Having a lot of kids can be demanding and confusing and chaotic. But it is also the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.

So, I not only understand why the Duggars have a lot of kids, I hope one day to have more. And I swear, I’ll keep working on making us less of an impact on the planet – that is what this blog is for, after all!

Thoughts on large families? Please comment – I’d love to keep the conversation going…

Resources:

Duggar’s New Show Schedule

Josh and Anna Duggar Website

Great List of Comebacks for Parents of Large Families

An Article by Rabbi Shumley Boteach on Large Families

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Technorati Tags: big families, duggar family, environmental impact, hogan family, homeschool, josh duggar, joshua duggar, large families, large family, michelle kennedy hogan, rabbi shumley boteach

I started thinking about this quote in a different way.

We are pretty unconventional people. We homeschool. We are self-employed. We are anti-TV. We only own one car (which is actually pretty unconventional where I live!). We use cloth diapers and make our own salsa and tomato sauce out of tomatoes we grew. We don’t really care about money that much.

So, in turn, we have raised pretty unconventional children. But this tends to bite us in the butt once in a while. Like when our oldest decided at the age of 16 that he was going to move to Austin, Texas and live there by himself.

What were we supposed to do? Tell him no? Tell him that even though we had raised him to be a responsible, free-thinking self-sufficient adult, he couldn’t make this leap and go out on his own? He had already graduated from our humble homeschool. He knew what it was to get up and go to work and make his way in the world. And, by holding him back, didn’t I risk him becoming angry and going off anyway – without the comfort of knowing that he could always come home? Having been through that myself, I refused to let my own child ever feel that way.

So, we let him go to Austin. And he came home, humbled by the experience and more resolved that he would rather go to college first. But if I hadn’t “let” him go, he might have gotten into real trouble – or worse.

It is difficult to model an unconventional life and then expect children to fit into a classic societal mold. I can’t, myself, proclaim to enjoy my life as a mother/farmer/writer and then be upset if my children decide to not go to college and become doctors or lawyers. I can’t walk around town, nursing and wearing my baby in my own funky clothes and then get upset that my son decides to wear the fingerless gloves made out of denim with the safety pins up the side.

There is certainly something for teaching children about “time and place.” We have many discussions about being polite and understanding that while I may not mind if they swear once in a while, a lot of adults – especially out in public – will be offended by it. But I can’t expect my kids not to swear – first of all, because

I just don’t care that much. It just doesn’t bother me, and I think making a big deal out of it makes it a bigger deal. In fact, I hear more swearing come out of the mouths of kids whose parents do make a deal out of it (and go to school) than my own, who have never really had a ban on swearing.

My rule was always that you couldn’t swear at another person – you can’t tell your brother to “@#$& off…” but if you stub your toe and say “@*#&” then – whatever.

It’s a fine line, certainly, but I hope that while I may not have chosen to live my life like “everyone else,” my kids will see that I try to be polite and kind to everyone. That I truly love my life and wouldn’t have it any other way (except for that lingering dream of living by the ocean). College or not – that’s really all I want for them, to be truly happy and enjoy everyday of their lives.

http://naturalfather.blogspot.com/2008/09/its-not-called-permissive-parenting.html

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Technorati Tags: attachment parenting, homeschool, homeschooling, unconventional children, unconventional parenting, unschooling

I was reading through their email newsletter this morning and found this from their editor, Nancy Carter:

“It’s so easy for us to see the absurdity of focusing on teaching a duck to climb instead of encouraging it to swim. But many of us are guilty of being so concerned that our kids are “keeping up” with where the other kids are that we focus more on covering our bases than allowing our children time to explore and develop their interests.”

Carter points us to another blog with a great post on creating homeschool transcripts that reflect letting kids explore their passions.

This is so true! I do, often, get caught up in what the other kids are learning – or doing. But I have to remember, that it just doesn’t matter – as long as my children are happy and learning the things they want to learn.

Liam, for example, did almost zero math for the last two years. No, really. We did it once in a while. He really hated it, got stressed out and cried. So we stopped. This year he said he’s like to do it again. I bought him the appropriate Saxon math book for 5th grade and we just started at Lesson 1. Without having done any formal math for the last two years (of course, we cooked and made things and used math, we just didn’t “do” math), he got right into the swing of things and after a week, is happily on Lesson 10, without a problem. Would he still be a crying mess if I had forced him to do math these last two years? And what does it say about a kid’s brain that they can pick up on the right grade-level stuff after not having done anything for two years? I’m not sure – except that I know it wasn’t until this year that he was “ready” for more formal schoolwork. I’m glad I gave him the time to play and explore and just “be” – not that he doesn’t get that now – rather than stress him out over something like math!

Just watch this short film, Animal School, it’s simply wonderful:

http://www.raisingsmallsouls.com/wp-content/themes/179/aschool012008.html

It would appear that I have created a number of bees, as well…and aren’t I the happier for it?

We may not be the best behaved bunch – but our dinner table conversations are very interesting!

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